by Will Durant
Perhaps some liaison had been established between Genovesi and Quesnay by Ferdinando Galiani, of Naples and Paris. Galiani published in 1750 a Trattato della moneta, in which, with the innocence of a twenty-two-year-old economist, he determined the price of a product by the cost of its production. More brilliant was his Dialoghi sul commercio dei grant, which we have noted as a criticism of Quesnay. When he had to come home after his exciting years in Paris, he mourned that Naples had no salons, no Mme. Geoffrin to feed him and stir his wit. It had, however, a philosopher who left a mark on history.
2. Giambattista Vico
At the age of seven, says his autobiography, he fell from a ladder, struck the ground head first, and remained unconscious for five hours. He suffered a cranial fracture over which a massive tumor formed. This was reduced by successive lancings; however, the boy lost so much blood in the process that the surgeons expected his early death. “By God’s grace” he survived, “but as a result of this mischance I grew up with a melancholy and irritable temperament.”98 He also developed tuberculosis. If genius depends upon some physical handicap Vico was richly endowed.
At seventeen (1685) he earned his bread by tutoring at Vatolla (near Salerno) the nephews of the bishop of Ischia. There he remained nine years, meanwhile feverishly studying jurisprudence, philology, history, and philosophy. He read with special fascination Plato, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Grotius, with some injury to his catechism. In 1697 he obtained a professorship in rhetoric at the University of Naples; it paid him only a hundred ducats yearly, to which he added by tutoring; on this he raised a large family. One daughter died in youth; one son showed such vicious tendencies that he had to be sent to a house of correction. The wife was illiterate and incompetent; Vico had to be father, mother, and teacher.99 Amid these distractions he wrote his philosophy of history.
Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla commune natura delle nazioni (1725) offered the “principles of a new science concerning the common nature of the nations,” and proposed to find in the jungle of history regularities of sequence that might illuminate past, present, and future. Vico thought that he could discern three main periods in the history of every people:
(1) The age of the gods, in which the Gentiles believed that they lived under divine governments, and that everything was commanded them by [gods through] auspices and oracles. … (2) The age of heroes, when these reigned in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority of nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of men, in which all recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and therefore established the first popular commonwealths, and then monarchies.100
Vico applied the first period only to “Gentiles” and “profane” (non-Biblical) history; he could not, without offending sacred tradition, speak of the Old Testament Jews as merely believing that they “lived under divine governments.,, Since the Inquisition (severer in Naples than in northern Italy) had prosecuted Neapolitan scholars for talking of men before Adam, Vico laboriously reconciled his formula with Genesis by supposing that all the descendants of Adam, except the Jews, had relapsed, after the Flood, into an almost bestial condition, living in caves, and copulating indiscriminately in a communism of women. It was from this secondary “state of nature” that civilization had developed through the family, agriculture, property, morality, and religion. At times Vico spoke of religion as a primitive animistic way of explaining objects and events; at times he exalted it as a peak of evolution.
To the three stages of social development correspond three “natures,” or ways of interpreting the world: the theological, the legendary, the rational.
The first nature, by an illusion of imagination (which is strongest in those who are weakest in reasoning power), was a poetic or creative nature, which we may be allowed to call divine, since it conceived physical things as animated by gods. … Through the same error of their imagination men had a terrible fear of the gods whom they themselves had created. … The second nature was the heroic: the heroes believed themselves to be of divine origin. … The third was the human nature [way], intelligent and therefore modest, benign, and rational, recognizing conscience, reason, and duty as laws.101
Vico strove to fit the history of language, literature, law, and government into this triadic scheme. In the first stage men communicated through signs and gestures; in the second, through “emblems, similitudes, images”; in the third, through “words agreed upon by the people, … whereby they might fix the meaning of the laws.” Law itself passed through a corresponding development: at first it was divine, god-given, as in the Mosaic code; then heroic, as in Lycurgus; then human—“dictated by fully developed human reason.”102 Government, too, has gone through three stages: the theocratic, in which the rulers claimed to be the voice of God; the aristocratic, in which “all civil rights” were confined to the ruling order of “heroes”; and the human, wherein “all are accounted equal before the laws. … This is the case in the free popular cities, and … also in those monarchies that make all their subjects equal under their laws.”103 Vico evidently recalled Plato’s summary of political evolution from monarchy through aristocracy to democracy to dictatorship (tyrannis), but he varied the formula to read: theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, monarchy. He agreed with Plato that democracy tends toward chaos, and he looked upon one-man rule as a necessary remedy for democratic disorder; “monarchies are the final governments … in which nations come to rest.”104
Social disorder may come through moral deterioration, luxury, effeminacy, loss of martial qualities, corruption in office, a disruptive concentration of wealth, or an aggressive envy among the poor. Usually such disorder leads to dictatorship, as when the rule of Augustus cured the democratic chaos of the Roman Republic.105 If even dictatorship fails to stem decay, some more vigorous nation enters as conqueror.
Since people so far corrupted have already become slaves of their unrestrained passions, … Providence decrees that they become slaves by the natural law of nations; … they become subject to better nations which, having conquered them, keep them as subject provinces. Herein two great lights of natural order shine forth: first, that he who cannot govern himself must let himself be governed by another who can; second, that the world is always governed by those who are naturally fittest.106
In such cases the conquered people falls back into the stage of development reached by its conquerors. So the population of the Roman Empire, after the barbarian invasions, relapsed into barbarism, and had to begin with theocracy [rule by priests and theology]; such were the Dark Ages. With the Crusades came another heroic age; the feudal chieftains correspond to the heroes of Homer, and Dante is Homer again.
We hear in Vico echoes of the theory that history is a circular repetition, and of Machiavelli’s law of corsi e ricorsi, development and return. The idea of progress suffers in this analysis; progress is merely one half of a cyclical movement in which the other half is decay; history, like life, is evolution and dissolution in an ineluctible sequence and fatality.
On his way Vico offered some striking suggestions. He reduced many heroes of classic legend to eponyms—afternames—post-factum personifications of long impersonal or multipersonal processes; so Orpheus was the imaginary consolidation of many primitive musicians; Lycurgus was the embodiment of the series of laws and customs that congealed Sparta; Romulus was a thousand men who had made Rome a state.107 Likewise Vico reduced Homer to a myth by arguing—half a century before Friedrich Wolf’s Prolegomena to Homer (1795)—that the Homeric epics are the accumulated and gradually amalgamated product of groups and generations of rhapsodes who sang, in the cities of Greece, the sagas of Troy and Odysseus.108 And almost a century before Barthold Niebuhr’s History of Rome (1811-32) Vico rejected as legendary the first chapters of Livy. “All the histories of the Gentile nations have had fabulous beginnings.”109 (Again Vico carefully avoids impugning the historicity of Genesis.)
This epochal book reveals a powerful but harassed mind struggling to formulate basic ideas without getting himself into an Inquisition jail. Vico went out of his way, time after time, to profess his loyalty to the Church, and he felt that he merited ecclesiastical commendation for explaining the principles of jurisprudence in a manner compatible with Catholic theology.110 We hear a sincerer tone in his view of religion as the indispensable support of social order and personal morality: “Religions alone have the power to cause the people to do virtuous works . . .”111 And yet, despite his frequent use of “Providence,” he seems to eliminate God from history, and to reduce events to the unimpeded play of natural causes and effects. A Dominican scholar attacked Vico’s philosophy as not Christian but Lucretian.
Perhaps the emerging secularism of Vico’s analysis had something to do with its failure to win a hearing in Italy, and doubtless the disorderly discursiveness of his work and the confusion of his thought doomed his “new science” to a still but painful birth. No one agreed with his belief that he had written a profound or illuminating book. He appealed in vain to Jean Le Clerc to at least mention it in the periodical Nouvelles de la républiquedes lettres. Ten years after the Scienza nuova appeared, Charles IV came to Vico’s aid by appointing him historiographer royal with a yearly stipend of a hundred ducats. In 1741 Giambattista had the satisfaction of seeing his son Gennaro succeed to his professorship in the University of Naples. In his final years (1743-44) his mind gave way, and he lapsed into a mysticism bordering on insanity.
A copy of his book was in Montesquieu’s library.112 In private notes the French philosopher acknowledged his debt to Vico’s theory of cyclical development and decay; and that debt, unnamed, appears in Montesquieu’s Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734). For the rest Vico remained almost unknown in France until Jules Michelet published (1827) an abridged translation of the Scienza nuova. Michelet described Italy as “the second mother and nurse who in my youth suckled me on Virgil, and in my maturity nourished me with Vico.”113 In 1826 Auguste Comte began the lectures that became his Cours de philosophie positive (1830-42), wherein the influence of Vico is felt at every stage. It was left for a Neapolitan, Benedetto Croce, to give Vico his full due,114 and to suggest again that history must take its place beside science as the ground and vestibule of philosophy.
3. Neapolitan Music
Naples reversed Pythagoras, and judged music to be the highest philosophy. Said Lalande, the French astronomer, after a tour of Italy in 1765-66:
Music is the special triumph of the Neapolitans. It seems as if in that country the membranes of the eardrum are more taut, more harmonious, more sonorous than elsewhere in Europe. The whole nation sings. Gestures, tone, voice, rhythm of syllables, the very conversation—all breathe music.... So Naples is the principal source of Italian music, of great composers and excellent operas; it is there that Corelli, Vinci, Rinaldo, Jommelli, Durante, Leo, Pergolesi, … and so many other famous composers have brought forth their masterpieces.115
Naples, however; was supreme only in opera and vocal melody; in instrumental music Venice led the way; and music fanciers complained that the Neapolitans loved the tricks of the voice more than the subtleties of harmony and counterpoint. Here reigned Niccolò Porpora, “perhaps the greatest singing teacher who ever lived.”116 Every Italian warbler aspired to be his pupil, and, once accepted, bore humbly with his imperious eccentricities; so, said a story, he kept Gaetano Caffarelli for five years at one page of exercises, and then dismissed him with the assurance that he was now the greatest singer in Europe.117 Second only to Porpora as a teacher was Francesco Durante, who taught Vinci, Jommelli, Pergolesi, Paisiello, and Piccini.
Leonardo Vinci seemed handicapped by his name, but he won early acclaim by his setting of Metastasio’s Didone abbandonata; Algarotti felt that “Virgil himself would have been pleased to hear a composition so animated and so harrowing in which the heart and soul were at once assailed by all the powers of music.”118 Still more famous was Leonardo Leo, in opera seria and buffa, oratorio, Masses, and motets; Naples oscillated for some time between laughing at his comic opera La finta Fracastana and weeping over the “Miserere” that he composed for the Lenten services of 1744.
When, about 1735, Leo heard a cantata by Niccolò Jommelli, he exclaimed, “A short time, and this young man will be the wonder and admiration of Europe.”119 Jommelli almost verified the prophecy. At twenty-three he won the plaudits of Naples with his first opera; at twenty-six he earned a similar triumph in Rome. Passing to Bologna, he presented himself as a pupil to Padre Martini; but when that reverend teacher heard him extemporize a fugue in all its classic development he cried out, “Who are you, then? Are you making fun of me? It is I who should learn from you.”120 At Venice his operas aroused such enthusiasm that the Council of Ten appointed him music director of the Scuola degli Incurabili; there he wrote some of the best religious music of that generation. Moving on to Vienna (1748) he composed in close friendship with Metastasio. After further victories in Venice and Rome he settled down in Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg (1753-68) as Kapellmeister to the Duke of Württemberg. Here he modified his operatic style in a German direction, giving more complexity to his harmony, more substance and weight to the instrumental music; he discarded the da capo repetition of arias, and provided orchestral accompaniment for recitatives. Probably under the influence of Jean-Georges Noverre, the French ballet master at Stuttgart, he gave ballet a prominent part in his operas. In some measure these developments in Jommelli’s music prepared the way for the reforms of Gluck.
When the aging composer returned to Naples (1768) the audience resented his Teutonic tendencies, and decisively rejected his operas. Mozart, hearing one of them there in 1770, remarked: “It is beautiful, but the style is too elevated, as well as too antique, for the theater.”121 Jommelli fared better with his church music; his “Miserere” and his Mass for the Dead were sung throughout the Catholic world. William Beckford, after hearing the Mass in Lisbon in 1787, wrote: “Such august, such affecting music I never heard, and perhaps may never hear again.”122 Having saved his earnings with Teutonic care, Jommelli retired to his native Aversa, and spent his final years in opulent corpulence. In 1774 all the prominent musicians of Naples attended his funeral.
Naples laughed even more than it sang. It was with a comic opera that Pergolesi conquered Paris after that proud city, alone among the European capitals, had refused to submit to Italy’s opera seria. Giovanni Battista Pergolesi did not fight that battle in person, for he died in 1736 at the age of twenty-six. Born near Ancona, he came to Naples at sixteen. By the age of twenty-two he had written several operas, thirty sonatas, and two Masses much admired. In 1733 he presented an opera, Il prigioniero, and as an interlude to this he offered La serva padrona— “the maid” become “mistress” of the house. The libretto is a jolly story of how Serpina, the servant, maneuvers her master into marrying her; the music is an hour of gaiety and agile arias. We have seen how this artful frolic captured the mood and heart of Paris in the Guerre des Bouffons of 1752, when it ran for a hundred performances at the Opéra, and then, in 1753, for ninety-six more at the Théâtre-Français. Meanwhile Pergolesi conducted his opera L’Olimpiade in Rome (1735). It was hailed with a storm of hoots, and with an orange accurately aimed at the composer’s head.123 A year later he went to Pozzuoli to be treated for tuberculosis, which had been made worse by his profligate life. His early death atoned for his sins, and he was buried in the local cathedral by the Capuchin friars among whom he had spent his last days. Rome, repentant, revived L’Olimpiade, and applauded it rapturously. Italy honors him not so much for his joyous intermezzi as for the tender sentiment of his “Stabat Mater,” which he did not live to complete. Pergolesi himself was made the subject of two operas.
Domenico Scarlatti, like Pergolesi, has been slightly inflated by the winds of taste, but who can resist the sparkle of his prestidigitation? Born in the annus mirabilis of Handel and Bach (1685), he was the sixth
child of Alessandro Scarlatti, then the Verdi of Italian opera. He breathed music from his birth. His brother Pietro, his cousin Giuseppe, his uncles Francesco and Tommaso, were musicians; Giuseppe’s operas were produced in Naples, Rome, Turin, Venice, Vienna. Fearing lest Domenico’s genius be stifled by this plethora of talent, the father sent him, aged twenty, to Venice. “This son of mine,” he said, “is an eagle whose wings are grown. He must not remain in the nest, and I must not hinder his flight.”124
In Venice the youth continued his studies, and met Handel. Perhaps together they passed to Rome, where, at the urging of Cardinal Ottoboni, they engaged in an amiable competition on the harpsichord and then on the organ. Domenico was already the best harpsichordist in Italy, but Handel, we are told, equaled him; while on the organ Scarlatti frankly owned il caro Sassone’s superiority. The two men became fast friends; this is extremely difficult for leading practitioners of the same art, but, a contemporary tells us, “Domenico had the sweetest temper and the genteelest behavior,”125 and Handel’s heart was as big as his frame. The shy modesty of the Italian deterred him from giving public displays of his harpsichord mastery; we know it only from reports of private musicales. One auditor in Rome (1714) “thought ten thousand devils had been at the instrument”; never before had he heard “such passages of execution and effect.”126 Scarlatti was the first to develop the keyboard potentialities of the left hand, including its crossing over the right. “Nature,” he said, “gave me ten fingers, and as my instrument has employment for all, I see no reason why I should not use them.”127
In 1709 he accepted appointment as maestro di capella to the former Queen of Poland, Maria Kazimiera. On the death of her husband, Jan So-bieski, she had been banished as a troublesome intriguer; coming to Rome in 1699, she resolved to set up a salon as brilliant with genius as that of Queen Christina of Sweden, who had died ten years before. In a palace on the Piazza della Trinità dei Monti she gathered many of Christina’s former circle, including several members of the Arcadian Academy. There (1709-14) Scarlatti produced several of his operas. Encouraged by their success, he presented Amleto (Hamlet) in the Teatro Capranico. It was not well received, and Domenico never again offered an opera to an Italian public. His father had set a standard too high for him to reach.